Barracks, Bivouacs and Battles - Forbes Archibald

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retreat covered by a strong body of native cavalry which showed a very determined front.

      Sholto and his comrade were close together in the ranks of the Ross-shire Buffs, when the former suddenly grasped the latter’s arm, and in a low earnest voice asked —

      “Mick, do you see that officer in charge of the covering squadron of the Pandies?”

      Sullivan gazed long and intently, and then burst out —

      “By the holy poker, it’s that treacherous blackguard Kidson!”

      “Right, Mick, and I must get at him somehow!”

      “Wid all my heart, chum, but it’s aisier said than done, just now, at any rate. You must mark time, and trust to luck!”

      Just then Barrow came galloping up at the head of his handful of horsemen, and besought the chief to let him go at the mutineer sowars. But Havelock shook his head, for Barrow’s strength all told was but eighteen sabres. But a little later Beatson, the Adjutant-General, who, stricken with cholera and unable to sit his horse, had come up to the front on a gun-carriage, saw an opportunity after the General had ridden away, and took it on himself to give Barrow leave to attack. The flank of the grenadier company of the Highlanders, where Sholto stood, was close to Beatson’s gun-carriage, in rear of which his horse was led, and a sudden thought struck the young fellow. Stepping forward with carried rifle, he told Captain Beatson that he was a cavalry soldier, and noticing the led horse, begged eagerly to be allowed to mount it and join the charge for which the volunteer cavalry were preparing.

      “Up with you, my man!” said poor dying Beatson. “Here, you shall have my sword, and I don’t want it back clean, remember!”

      Sholto was in the saddle with a spring, and made the nineteenth man under Barrow’s command; a mixed lot, but full of pluck to a man. As he formed up on the flank, there reached his ears honest Mick’s cheery advice —

      “Now, Sholto, me dear lad, keep yer sword-hand up and yer bridle-hand down, an’ remimber ye reprisint the honour an’ glory of the ould 30th Light!”

      Barrow threw away his cigar, gathered up his reins, and with a shout of “Charge!” that might have given the word of command to a brigade, rammed his spurs into his horse’s flank and went off at score, his little band close on his heels. Hard on the captain’s flank galloped Sholto Mackenzie, a red spot on each cheek, his teeth hard set, his blazing eyes never swerving from the face of one man of that seething mass on which they were riding. “Give ’em the point, lads!” roared Barrow, as he skewered a havildar and then drove right in among them. The white-faced man with the black moustache, who was Sholto’s mark, rather shirked out of the mêlée when he saw it was to be close quarters; but Mackenzie, looking neither to the right nor to the left, with his bridle-hand well down, and Beatson’s sword in full play, drove his way at length within weapon’s length of the other.

      “Now, liar and perjurer!” he hissed from between his teeth, “if you are not coward as well, stand up to me and let us fight it out!”

      Kidson’s answer was a lurid scowl and a pistol bullet, which just grazed Sholto’s temple. Lifting his horse with his bridle-hand, and striking its flanks with his spurless heels, the latter sent his sword-point straight at Kidson’s throat. The thrust would have gone through and out at the further side, but that the sword-point struck some concealed protection and was shivered up to the hilt. The renegade Briton smiled a baleful smile as he brought his weapon from guard to point, as if the other was at his mercy. But this was not so; with a shout Sholto tightened the curb-rein till his horse reared straight on end, striking it as it rose with the shattered sword hilt. The maddened animal plunged forward, receiving in his chest the point of Kidson’s sword; and Sholto on the instant bending forward fastened a deadly grip on the other’s throat. The impetus hurled both of them to the ground, and now, down among the horses’ feet, the close-locked strife swaying and churning above them, their struggle unto the death was wrought out. Kidson struggled like a madman; he bit, he kicked, he fought with an almost superhuman fury; but the resolute grip of the avenger never slackened on his throat. Sholto held on with his right hand, groping about with his left for some weapon wherewith to end the contest. At length his grasp closed on the hilt of a dropped sword; – and a moment later it was all over with the man whom the survivors of Havelock’s Ironsides speak of with scorn and disgust to this day by the name of “Nana Sahib’s Englishman.”

      THE OLD SERGEANT

      The scene of my little story is a sequestered hill-parish away up among the brown moors and sullen pinewoods of northern Scotland, and the date of it is full forty years ago, when I was a boy living in the grey old manse down in the sheltered glen which was the only picturesque “bit” of all the parish whose minister my father was. It was a curiously primitive region. Its crofters and farmers lived out their lives and were laid in the old graveyard up on the hillock – hardly a soul of them having ever been twenty miles outside the parish bounds. There was a vague lingering tradition concerning a scapegrace son, long since dead and gone, of old Sandy McCulloch of the Calternach – how the daring young ne’er-do-well had actually left his native land, made his way to India – we boys used to look up the map of India in the manse atlas – had married a “begum” there, and had finally been poisoned off by that mysterious female. This tradition had engendered a fine wholesome terror of begums, and all kinds of adventures that haply might involve matrimonial connections therewith, with disastrous results to follow. So our young men stayed at home and tilled the sour cold land laboriously but contentedly. There were a few exceptions, it is true. Now and then a young fellow would take the Queen’s shilling, and go out from among us on a career of soldiering. They seldom came back, for Cardwell’s name had not yet been heard in the land, and short service in the army was a reform undreamed of. When a man ’listed then, it was nominally for life; actually, until his bodily vigour was so impaired that he was held no longer fit for service, and then he got a pension for the remainder of his days. But what with hard service abroad, what with cholera in Hindustan and Yellow Jack in the West Indies, what with poor fare in barracks and on noxious crowded transports, no great proportion of the soldiers of those days managed to keep alive long enough to attain the pensioned period. There was but one army-pensioner in our parish, and he is “the old sergeant” of my story.

      They were grand old specimens, those veterans of a bypast era. To them the credit of their old regiment and the honour of the service were dearer than anything else in all the world. They had a great self-respect that had been instilled by the discipline they had undergone, and by the dangers they had passed through. They had a single-hearted loyalty to the Crown they had served, and a manly belief in the country which their strong arms and ready weapons had helped to save. It is no doubt all right in a military sense that there are no old soldiers among us now; but of this I am sure, that in a good many respects the country is the worse for the want of them.

      There was a Sunday morning of my boyhood which I remember as if it were yesterday. The Sunday school, held in the grey old schoolroom on the edge of the wood in the centre of which stood the parish kirk, had just been dismissed. The bell had not yet begun to ring, but it was the custom of the great straggling parish to hold its grand weekly palaver, summer and winter alike, on the little wood-encircled open space around the kirk, during the half-hour before the simple Presbyterian service began. To this end, the folk who were to constitute the congregation were gathering, coming in by twos and threes along the various paths centring on the kirk. Good old Willie Duffus, the elder from the far-distant Forgie district, had climbed and descended the bleak shoulder of Muldearie, had picked his devious way across the moss, had forded the burn, and was now so close at hand that I could discern the weather-beaten fluffiness of his ancestral beaver, and the resplendent brass buttons on the mediæval blue coat which had not been new when it had been his grandfather’s wedding-garment. Johnny Mills, the cripple tailor, who was wont to carry his goose and ironing-board from farmhouse to farmhouse, and to accept his food as part of his poor pay, came shambling up the dykeside from his hovel in the kailyard under the old willow-tree. With an air of rustic patronage which he could well afford, since most of the poor folk were in his books, Sandy Riach, the “merchant” of the Kirktoun, came strutting up the path from the little wooded hamlet. The farm lads, with their straw-coloured or red hair cut square in

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